Kassir.ru claims to benefit – Newspaper Kommersant No. 183 (7384) dated 10/04/2022

Kassir.ru applied to Yandex with a pre-trial claim for compensation of 328 million rubles. lost profit. The ticket service believes that due to the creation of enriched answers by Yandex in the search results of Kassir.ru, there were no users. The Federal Antimonopoly Service previously admitted that Yandex created unfavorable conditions for other market participants, but now we are talking about monetary compensation, which it will be difficult for Kassir.ru to justify, lawyers say.

“Kassir.ru” in a pre-trial order demanded from “Yandex” 328 million rubles. lost profits due to the creation by an Internet company of discriminatory conditions in the search engine with the help of “sorcerers” (enriched answers in search results), a representative of the ticket service told Kommersant. According to him, the corresponding claim was sent to Yandex on September 20.

From 2018 to 2021, with the use of “sorcerers”, Yandex.Poster poached potential customers of Kassira.ru, which led to an outflow of the Kassira.ru client base, Yevgeny Finkelstein, general director of the service, told Kommersant. “FAS and Yandex signed a settlement agreement, but it did not take into account the interest of Kassira.ru, we suffered significant losses,” he explains. Yandex declined to comment.

Kassir.ru complained to the Federal Antimonopoly Service that Yandex was using its dominant position by selling tickets through Yandex.Afisha using a widget in the search results, in 2019 (see “Kommersant” dated June 28, 2019). The antimonopoly case against Yandex was initiated only in April 2021, already following a complaint from a coalition of Internet companies (Avito, ivi, Wildberries, etc.), they believed that Yandex was abusing its dominant position in search results due to ” sorcerers.” The settlement agreement in the case was signed in January 2022. According to it, all market participants will receive equal access to “sorcerers”, and the search engine will contribute 1.5 billion rubles. to the Russian Foundation for the Development of Information Technologies.

Avito stated that the settlement agreement settled all disputed issues. Wildberries declined to comment. Kassir.ru twice, in February and April, unsuccessfully filed cassation complaints against the settlement agreement (see Kommersant dated April 26). Yandex previously claimed that Kassir.ru withdrew from the agreement “by its own unmotivated decision.”

If the companies fail to resolve the dispute out of court, Kassir.ru has the right to file a lawsuit, says Yaroslav Shitsle, head of IT & IP Dispute Resolution at the law firm Rustam Kurmaev and Partners. According to him, Kassir.ru will not have to prove in court that Yandex violated the law on competition (the company can refer to the decision of the antimonopoly dispute), but it is necessary to prove the very fact of causing losses and justify the amount of damage. In order to win the case, Kassir.ru must prove in numbers the percentage of user churn due to Yandex’s actions, and that this churn is not related to any other circumstances, says Ekaterina, partner at Pen & Paper Tokarev. According to her, disputes about lost profits are usually the most difficult, because it is quite difficult to prove the amount of income that could have been received: this requires a large amount of financial documents, financial analytics, and possibly an examination.

Anastasia Gavrilyuk